While Netflix itself classes Horse Girl as a “mind-bending drama”, the psychological exploration of a young woman’s struggle with mental health also easily falls into the horror genre.
Horse Girl follows Sarah (Alison Brie), an eccentric but sweet young woman with a strong affection for horses, as she undergoes struggles with mental illness. The trailers for Horse Girl certainly frame the piece like a horror movie, using disorienting shots and ominous music to portend Sarah’s deterioration.
“Horror” is an umbrella term that encompasses a wide range of movies. It covers everything from existential creature features like Underwater and Alien to big budget paranormal affairs like The Conjuring to slow burn dramas that highlight relationship dynamics like Hereditary, Rosemary’s Baby and, arguably, Horse Girl. Movies like these might include supernatural elements, but it is rarely certain whether they are literal or have a human origin. They rely less on jump scares and more on dull dread that follows audiences past the movie’s end credits.
Netflix’s Horse Girl Uses Horror Techniques To Explore Sarah’s Mental Health Struggles
As Sarah’s mental health worsens, Horse Girl tilts into a world in which it is difficult for the audience to discern what is real. The movie’s conception comes from a place of fear, exploring lead actress and co-writer Alison Brie’s own experiences. Like Sarah, Brie has a history of mental illness in her family that haunts her with the terrifying notion of being “a ticking time bomb”.
To explore this fear, Horse Girl relies on several horror techniques. When Sarah begins sleepwalking, it is first noticed by her roommate’s boyfriend. Everything about that scene reads like a horror movie: the tracking shot, the middle-of-the-night atmosphere, the look-over-your-shoulder framing. Initially, the horror highlights how Sarah’s struggles affect those around her. Eventually, the movie moves onto exploring how they affect her, relying on disorientating time and location skips not dissimilar to Stanley Kubrick’s treatment of The Shining. Among the many wild Kubrick techniques used in the psychological horror, one was to create an impossible floorplan for the Overlook Hotel, with the express purpose of unsettling audiences and placing them in the characters’ shoes.
Does Everything In Horse Girl Happen In Sarah’s Head?
Initially, it is possible for the audience to differentiate between reality and Sarah’s perception of it. A mentally ill homeless man shouts about Satico, god of technology, ruling over our reality and this becomes the basis of Sarah’s conspiracy theories. She watches a show about clones and becomes certain she is one. The audience is able to make their own observations, noting the discomfort with which the people at the horse ranch react to Sarah. As the movie progresses, this distinction becomes more and more difficult to come by. Horror often explores the tenuous lines of reality. In The Babadook, the protagonist’s depression is turned into a literal monster, but much of the tension hinges on whether or not the monster is real or within her.
The ending of Horse Girl is a protracted mental breakdown in which the audience, much like Sarah, loses all clarity on which events are definitely real and which might be real. The movie takes an incredibly empathetic stance towards Sarah’s mental illness, drawing the audience into Sarah’s fears, reality, and thought processes. The ending’s ambiguity adds to audience discomfort. Sarah floating towards the Mark of Hades, a symbol straight from her favorite television show, Purgatory, indicates that everything that happens is an extension of Sarah’s perspective. However, the film also hints that Joan (Molly Shannon) got a glimpse of the time travel, leaving a slim possibility that all of it, the aliens, the clones, the abductions, is true. Both realities are imbued with dread and uncertainty. Horse Girl is, at its core, a horror movie not just because of aesthetic and directorial choices, but because it understands the potential horror has to force audiences into confronting both their fears and themselves.
Next: Why Is Alison Brie In So Many Netflix Movies & TV Shows?
